Dive into the archives.
- Beneath the Headlines: BP’s Radical R&D
Our headlines continue to engulf BP with our passionate blame. But increasingly, after we turn the page, another story begins to coalesce: BP as the genius of Big Oil’s future: it has been BP’s pioneering fieldwork in capping the busted Macondo well that has shaped Big Oil’s billion dollar emergency response plan for the Obama [...]
- DayTrading & Managing Our Own Minds
Increasingly, clients have described their turn to trading in volatile and uncertain markets, as their corporate incomes have vanished and their assessments of possible return to their former workforce positions have darkened. Day trading.
Paradoxically, they have embraced uncertainty as their former sense of loyalty to firm and task has been disappointed. Their “security”, they say, [...]
- Organizational Dysfunction, Outplacing Emotion and a Man Called “Lynch”
In the movie version of the low-budget tv series, “The A-Team”, there is a running gag about CIA agents who all identify themselves– whether in Vietnam, Desert Storm, Iraqi Freedom, or home in the good ole USA, as “Mr Lynch”. The Kafka-esque or perhaps, Beckettian (thinking of Godot…) nature of the joke resonated deeply with [...]
- Thinking Out Loud: Making Explicit Individual & Organizational Similarity
An ongoing interest of mine is in linking the similarities across different psychological systems.
Individual, group, and organizational systems share a number of common attributes. These include: a recognizable systemic identity; distinct rituals and practices; differences between the subject and other entities; specific intra-system roles and specializations; a capability to change; the fact that change operates [...]
- Career Anxieties
This is how she remembered what her husband had said: ” Your preoccupation with work is destroying this family. We can’t take how wretched you’ve become.”
And as she told it, she’d successfully kept her underlying depression at bay for years. But 18 months of unemployment— which were the busiest months of her life as she [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative: The Midlife “NO!”
The first hurdle facing consideration of independent employment for the midlife professional is internal. Its that assertive inner voice that says, “Hey—I’m 45, 50, 55, 60 years old. If I were a risk-taking entrepreneur, I would have been doing it years ago. I wouldn’t have worked the way I’ve worked, throughout my work life.” The [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative. Transforming the sunk cost of job loss.
Peter Goodman reports in today’s New York Times that the underemplyment rate– including the jobless and those working part time though desirous of full-time work– has reached 17% of the workforce. That’s up from even a week ago .
Pausing for a moment both to reflect on the despair of economic dislocation and to ask, “what [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative. Exercise 2 for Reluctant Entrepreneurs.
Eight arguments against trying the Working Knowledge Initiative and one reason for.
1) The premises of WKI are unreliable, untested (by me), and might discount my view of reality. Its something new— I’d prefer the tried and true. There’s nothing really wrong, anyway. Things will get better. I’ll wait to find work.
2) If my view of [...]
- Learning From Cases: 2. The Adrenaline Rush of Manic Trading
Twitter has begun to serve the social function of anchoring day traders to one another in a virtual community. Checking in on one another’s picks and strategies, supporting one another’s creative trading approaches, the positive takeaway is that a lonely and isolating occupation has developed a communicative outlet. The downside is that as with drinking, [...]
- Learning From Cases: 1. Emotional Learning as Value
Recent consultations with clients have converged in an exciting empirical finding. Focusing upon significant emotional and vocational transitions at midlife, we have often inventoried both material assets and knowledge assets at different life stages.
With the financial markets bubbling up 50% above their recent lows, clients seemed curious about looking back over adulthood and quantifying “how [...]
